In telephone call centres, such as Emergency Response Centres (ERCs), the queuing and routing of telephone calls are of critical importance. For instance, when an emergency situation has occurred in a particular area, and sufficient information about the emergency has been obtained from calls by people in the area, further calls about that emergency should preferably have lower priority than new calls about a different emergency which has not yet been reported.
In prior art systems a call originating from a location of a known emergency is either placed in a low-priority queue, or played a pre-recorded message indicting that the emergency has already been reported, thereby reducing duplication of emergency reports.